Seven questions answered about Ukraine and the protests there

An opposition supporter throws a bottle simulating a molotov cocktail during a training session near Kiev's Independence Square, the epicenter of the country's current unrest, Ukraine, Friday, Jan. 31, 2014.

Ukraine (not “the Ukraine”) is a country in Eastern Europe, between Russia and Central Europe. It’s big — about the area of Texas, with a little less than twice the population. Its history goes back thousands of years — the first domesticated horses were here — and has long been characterized by intersections between “east” and “west.” That includes today’s crisis.

Ukraine has a long history of being subjugated by foreign powers. It’s been independent only since 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and it broke away. The last time it was independent, for a few years right after World War I (and before that, briefly, in the 1600s), it had different borders and very different demographics. That turns out to be really important.

2. Why are Ukrainians protesting?

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The protests started, mostly in the capital, Kiev, on Nov. 21, after President Viktor Yanukovych rejected an expected deal for greater economic integration with the European Union. The deal was popular with Ukrainians, particularly in Kiev and that part of the country, although not as popular as you may have heard: About 42 or 43 percent support it.

Symbolically, Yanukovych’s decision was seen as a turn away from Europe and toward Moscow, which rewarded Ukraine with a stimulus package worth billions of dollars and a promise of cheaper gas exports. Russia subjugated or outright ruled Ukraine for generations, so you can see why that could hit a nerve.

But this is about more than just geopolitics. Yanukovych and his government, since taking power in 2010, have mismanaged the economy and been increasingly seen as corrupt. In 2004, there were mass protests against Yanukovych when he won the presidential election under widespread suspicions of fraud; those protests, which kept him from office, are known as the “Orange Revolution.”

The current protests had been dying down until Jan. 16, when Yanukovych signed an anti-protest laws that sharply restricted free speech, the media, driving in groups, even wearing a helmet. Demonstrations resurged with a vengeance, not just in Kiev but also in a number of regional capitals, with protesters in some places seizing and occupying government administration buildings.

3. I heard this was about Ukrainians wanting ties with Europe and their government selling out to Moscow. Is it?

That’s sort of true. Lots of Ukrainians want their country to be “European” rather than linked with Russia, and Yanukovych is sure buddying up to Moscow. But it’s also sort of wrong. A third of Ukrainians say that rather than the E.U. deal, they’d prefer integrating with the Russian-dominated Eurasian Customs Union. So it’s more split than you’d think.

Here’s the thing you have to understand: Ukraine is internally divided by language, by history and by politics. One-third of the country speaks Russian as its native language, and in practice even more use it day-to-day. Those Russian-speakers mostly live in the eastern half of the country. Most Ukrainian-speakers are in the western half.

Those two halves of Ukraine also have different politics — and different visions for the country. If you compare maps of Ukraine’s linguistic division, that split lines up almost perfectly with the results of the 2004 and 2010 presidential elections. The western half of the country voted overwhelmingly against Yanukovych in both; that’s also where, until very recently, most of the protests have been.

This divide has been a challenge for Ukraine since its independence in 1991, pulling the country in opposite directions. As the Ukraine-focused political scientist Leonid Peisakhin put it, Ukraine “has never been and is not yet a coherent national unit with a common narrative or a set of more or less commonly shared political aspirations.”

In some ways, this crisis is about popular anger against a president who mishandled the economy and whose attempts to quash protests have edged into authoritarianism. But it’s also about Ukraine’s long-unresolved national identity crisis.

4. Wow. How did Ukraine get so divided?

Ukraine was conquered and divided for centuries by neighboring powers: the Polish, the Austrians and, above all, the Russians. But Russian rulers didn’t want to just rule Ukraine, they also wanted to make it Russian.

The Russification of Ukraine began 250 years ago with Catherine the Great, who oversaw Russia’s “golden age” in the late 1700s. At first, she controlled only eastern Ukraine, where she developed vast coal and iron industries to feed Russia’s expansion. Although she later took the west as well, she and subsequent Russian rulers focused on the east, which also happens to include some of the most productive farmland in the world.

The director of Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute, Serhii Plokhii, recently told National Geographic that the country is divided between a super-fertile steppe in the east and forestland in the west — an ecological split that lines up nicely with the linguistic-political line in our maps above.

So many Russians swept into Ukraine’s southeast that it became known as “Novorossiya,” or “New Russia.” Russian leaders, hoping to make the territory permanently Russian, banned the Ukrainian language.

In the 1930s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin “collectivized” peasants into state-run farms, which resulted in several million Ukrainians dying of starvation. The governments of Ukraine and the United States consider it a deliberate act of genocide, although historians are more divided. After the famine, Stalin repopulated the devastated eastern farmlands by shipping in Russians.

Russia’s cultural imprint goes deep, and not just because so many Ukrainians speak Russian as their first language. When the Western-oriented, Ukrainian-nationalist politician Viktor Yushchenko became president, in 2005, “about 60 percent of TV programming was in Russian and 40 percent in Ukrainian,” the Christian Science Monitor reported. By the time he left office in 2010, the Monitor said, “that ratio [had] been roughly reversed.” Most magazines and newspapers were still in Russian. This came after five years of “Ukrainization” so aggressive that, even though he spoke fluent Russian, Yushchenko would converse with Russian President Vladimir Putin only through an interpreter.

5. Why is Russia still so important to an independent Ukraine?

Putin has pushed Ukraine aggressively to reject the European Union and, he hopes, join the Moscow-led Eurasian Customs Union, which consists of a few other former Soviet states. Putin’s effort included threatening to impose economic sanctions on Ukraine. In 2004 and 2006, when the pro-Western Yushchenko was in power, Russia shut off natural gas exports to Ukraine over political disputes, doing serious damage to the economy.

But if Putin taketh away, he also giveth. A few weeks after Yanukovych rejected the E.U. deal, Putin offered Ukraine a stimulus package worth $15 billion and a 33 percent price cut for Russian natural gas. That will make it much tougher for Yanukovych to abandon Putin’s embrace, particularly given how much of the popular discontent is driven by the poor economy.

6. Why does Russia care so much about Ukraine?

There are the surface reasons. The cultural connections are indeed strong, and Putin can’t not want to remain close to a country with so much shared history and so many Russians. A source of food and a transit hub for Russian energy exports, Ukraine is economically and strategically important to Russia. Putin is thought to personally care a great deal about the Eurasian Customs Union and to see it as his legacy.

And then there are the deeper reasons. Ukraine makes or breaks Russia’s self-image as a great power, which has fared poorly since the fall of the Berlin Wall. As Tufts political scientist Dan Drezner wrote in Foreign Policy, “For all of Putin’s Middle East diplomacy, Ukraine is far more important to his great power ambitions. One of the very first sentences you’re taught to say in Foreign Policy Community College is, ‘Russia without Ukraine is a country; Russia with Ukraine is an empire.’ ”

Even if Putin can’t bring Ukraine in, he’d like to keep it out of the European Union, which he sees as an extension of a century-old Western conspiracy against Russia. This is why, silly though it may sound, some security experts emphasize Ukraine’s importance to Russia as a defensive buffer.

7. What’s going to happen next?

The parliament this week rolled back most of the anti-protest laws that had so angered people; it also passed a blanket amnesty for protesters, provided they leave government buildings they’ve occupied.

Putin has put the $15 billion financial aid package on hold, which could make it easier for Yanukovych to walk away from Moscow and go back to the E.U. deal.

Still, protests are spreading rapidly — including into the country’s Russian-speaking eastern regions. Right now, the immediate crisis is about more than the E.U. deal or the cultural divide or even the anti-protest laws, even if all those things brought Ukraine’s crisis to this point. Yanukovych’s not-terribly-adept handling of the two-month crisis has forced him into a very tight little corner.